OK. I actually wrote all but the final paragraph of this down by hand in the Summer of 2013 while enjoying what I could of the English weather, either sitting in my garden or lazing around Leeds Castle. Because that’s how I roll now, I chill at castles and write in journals. Unfortunately, the idea of typing it up was boring enough to make me put it off for four months, which is why it’s only getting out to the world now; so some parts, about dragonflies and such forth, may seem unseasonable. The fact I start it off by pointing out I intended to write it earlier shows the vile danger of procrastination, especially when there isn’t a deadline. Better late than never though, eh? I also cut out about 800 words of me ranting about the education system and why I left the job. It’s not very interesting and it’s one of the things I really dislike about teachers, they’re/we’re always whinging.
The plan was to write this in January in an attempt to keep in touch with people who I haven’t seen or heard from in a while. Despite being able to instantly contact people on the other side of the planet via the internet or phone I just seem to…not. I suppose it might be partly due to more pressing local concerns like earning and spending money, but that sounds like a bad excuse considering that I’ve spent the last thirty years being told that the most important thing in life is who you share it with.
I suppose another thing is, what are we supposed to talk about? We don’t have any recent shared experiences, no plans to make. We can talk about things we’ve done but they start to seem like isolated stories full of unknown characters that we have no connection with.
*****
I’m writing this while sitting on a wooden bench in front of the garden pond. There is a dull drone of traffic but it is drowned out by the sound of the waterfall for the most part. The koi are serenely floating near the surface, basking in the sun while the smaller fish dart about the perimeter, chasing one another back and forth. Honey bees industriously work among the flowers around me and birdsong fills the trees with light chirping. The chickens puncture this with an intermittent cluck from behind me but are generally content to sit in the shade and watch the light aircraft come in to land at Rochester airport.
Then there are the dragonflies. I like dragonflies generally: they’re rare but colourful, they don’t try to sit on my food, fly into my eyes or crawl into my ears and nostrils. They’re altogether fairly pleasant company as far as flying insects go. They have, however, decided to make my garden pond the site of some great dragonfly orgy. Where normally I would see maybe two dozen dragonflies in an entire Summer, I’ve just seen upwards of thirty in the last forty minutes, all copulating like teenagers at a music festival. Well, not quite in the same way. There aren’t any tents and the dragonflies probably aren’t high, plus the biology is quite different. That said, the attitude is exactly the same.
*****
I hate not knowing what to say on the phone. I’m fine with comfortable silences as long as I know it’s a comfortable silence. If I can’t see the other person I tend to presume that they feel as irritated as I feel awkward. This makes for a definite uncomfortable silence.
Apparently telephobia actually does exist and I’m not alone in my irrational fear of holding conversations through technology. There are thousands of people who are similarly crippled and would rather walk five miles to ask a question about income tax rather than phone a call centre and try to explain the situation. Still, I should call you more often and I don’t. My bad. What I’m trying to say is it is definitely not a case of me not being bothered, just being an absolutely rubbish person in this sphere.
So. Updates.
It’s hard to know where to start considering I don’t know what you already know. The odd Facebook message here or there might have told you some or all of this, so I’m figuring I’ll go back a couple of years and move forward from there. Feel free to scan through rather than read it, I doubt it’s going to be anywhere near as amusing as me being run over by a taxi. That was comedy gold.
2012 was a good year. I found that I had managed to get a place on the London Marathon just before New Year through someone from my school dropping out. This did only give me three months to prepare my utterly unfit carcass to drag itself around 26 miles of my capital’s streets at something slightly faster than a walking pace though, about a third of the preparation time that was needed according to most of the training books I found. My dad was running it too which helped with the training, but between work, the weather and my general laid-back attitude my training regime maxed out at three runs a week, with none stretching over 18 miles. Predictably, my pace on the day was far slower than I’d like, with my final time being just over 5 hours and 10 minutes. If we take off 10 minutes for stopping to talk to people and slowing down for a chat with my dad it’s still only just over 5 mph which isn’t much faster than a brisk walk. Still, people seem in awe of my ‘achievement’ despite my lacklustre performance which has helped cast off the well
founded myth that I am in fact quite a lazy fellow.
founded myth that I am in fact quite a lazy fellow.
One thing that I did learn is that crowd support really does help. I had always thought it was just something sportspeople said to encourage fans to pay to see them, but it actually was a boost having the crowd encouraging me all the way. I’d followed the advice of the charities I was running for (Breast and Prostate Cancer Research) and had put my name on the front of my shirt which meant complete strangers in the crowd were calling me out by name and telling me to keep going. Possibly because I looked knackered and out of my depth. The charities had also brought along their own groups of crowd support who were specifically looking for us. The first group I came across I hadn’t noticed, so when they went completely berserk I was in real danger of doing a Paula Radcliffe. I don’t mean running fast and winning, I mean the other thing she is famous for doing at a marathon.
*****
I think the orgy is over. There’s just one dragonfly left who turned up late to the party. He’s sitting by himself on a lily pad. Everyone else has buggered off, presumably to do the dragonfly equivalent of having a smoke and listening to some live music. I sympathise.
*****
I followed this up with the London to Brighton Bike Ride two months later. At 54 miles it is twice as long as the marathon, but I should have been travelling at about twice the speed. This didn’t happen.
Within the first twenty miles, a little after we cleared Greater London, I had a puncture. This wasn’t a problem, everyone carries at least one spare inner tube, it’s common sense. Only a complete moron wouldn’t bring one. It’s like hosting a house party but only providing tequila shots as refreshments: it might work out alright but the odds are you’re going to regret your lack of preparation, as is everyone involved with your efforts. Especially the teetotaller. In this case it was my folks and team-mates around me who ended up regretting bringing along the lanky marathon guy.
It was another six or seven miles to the next marshal but that’s doable with a slow puncture, I just needed to put some more air in to protect my wheels. I started pumping away at the tyre, feeling embarrassed at my schoolboy, nay, infantile mistake of forgetting my repair kit and inner tube. Perhaps the shame made me careless; in any case the valve decided it would be a good time to explode. My tyre with a slow puncture became a ragged piece of rubber wrapped around my wheel. We sent the others on ahead why my dad and I trekked back to the last marshal station a mile and a half behind us.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the mechanic’s contact point was missing a somewhat vital element: a mechanic. Apparently he simply hadn’t deigned to turn up to the biggest bike ride in the country. Considering the amount of business flowing through I would say it was his loss, but as I sat forlornly waiting for a marshal’s car to take me to the next mechanic along the route I couldn’t help feeling inconvenienced. Still, the car didn’t take long and fairly soon I was nine miles down the road being ripped off by a Spanish woman for an inner tube that wasn’t quite the right size. ‘It’ll be fine,’ she said, ‘trust me.’
Of course I trusted her. I was desperate, she was fairly attractive. Mirroring my romantic life, this was quite inevitably a mistake.
Three miles later, my tyre was flat. My dad and I re-inflated it. On average, every three miles after that, it was flat. For about 27 miles. Another slow puncture that we had to deal with nine times. Needless to say, these frequent stops meant that we had no hope at all of making up on our delay and meeting the others. Happily I found the last honest mechanic in Southern England before I had to make my way up to Ditchling Beacon. I got a good inner tube for the handful of change I had left in my pocket as well as some adjustments to the handlebars. Namely turning the fork 180 degrees so the wheel was on the right way around. In my defence it looked much the same from a distance, and made no real difference apart from making me look like I’d only learned to ride a bike in the last three weeks.
I suppose I should probably knock cycling off of the activities section of my CV, I obviously haven’t a clue of what I’m doing. Perhaps I could move it to ‘Known Medical Conditions’ considering my history on two wheels.
I made it in the end, though it took significantly longer than the marathon. No-one is impressed by the London to Brighton. I should have just run another fourteen miles.
In year 10 of school, back when I was fifteen, we had a field trip to Snowdonia for our geography GCSE. I quite enjoyed it. It wasn’t proper camping because we were in a Youth Hostel, but we practiced vaguely useful skills which put it ahead of the majority of my education. Navigation, survival and first aid might not be useful every day, but are a whole tonne more useful than knowing Pi to six decimal places. Which I don’t know, but you get the idea. These skills only get more useful when the zombie apocalypse comes. And it will.
Towards the end of the trip we all traipsed up Mount Snowdon via three different routes depending on how well we had done with our previous tasks in hiking and sea-level traversing. Being used to family holidays walking across Dartmoor, I found myself going up the most difficult approach of the three even though the previous day I’d almost fallen into a ravine through being a clumsy oaf. It was difficult going at times, particularly when we were climbing up a shale slope into the wind where we found ourselves slipping down a step for every two we took forward, but in the main I took it at a brisk walk, jogging the last hundred meters to the summit.
With this in mind, along with my friends, Richie ‘from Mexico’ and Suzanne I drove toward the Grim North and our hotel overlooking the old docks of Liverpool. I’d booked the hotel weeks in advance, going for a room with three single beds in a row. It was cheap which overrode any desire for privacy, besides which it was only for a couple of nights. I was still naively unprepared for what the three person room looked like in real life: a tiny double bed with a bunk bed over it angled at ninety degrees. They all looked like Wendy House sized pieces of furniture. There wasn’t an option of another room, so we went trekking out through town looking for another hotel. The only place that cost less than £70 was a youth hostel across the road which Richie gallantly volunteered for while Sue and I took our original room. Apparently he likes meeting people. I’m not so fussed on people, especially when they blunder into a shared room at 4am and puke in the bin, but he avoided that experience this time.
Snowdon did look like it does in the pictures, so at least we weren’t mis- sold on that account. When I say it looked like it does in pictures, I mean there was an endless convoy of increasingly miserable people hiking their way up through unrelenting drizzle to a peak hidden behind a fog bank. Or maybe it was a cloud. I tend to think of clouds as being high, fluffy and light though, if not white, while this wall of dark water was borderline aggressive. We were taking one of the easier ‘tourist’ routes as we had no desire to get lost in Snowdonia and climb the wrong mountain; what with the fog this was a very real possibility.
Snowdon isn’t all that difficult a climb, a fact attested to by the obese sponsored walkers and small children scaling the slope. This unfortunately highlights my own lack of fitness when, halfway up, Richie pushed ahead like a gazelle on amphetamines while Sue and I started taking regular ‘rest stops’ as our bodies made it abundantly clear that they weren’t onboard with the ‘Snowdon is easy’ philosophy. We got up there eventually , just after Richie passed us on his way down because it was ‘too cold’ up there. On the plus side the sun finally came out as re reached the summit, giving us a really quite beautiful view. After ten minutes I even had enough oxygen in my body to focus on it. Good times.
Later in the Summer I got to visit some friends in the USA and go to the most extravagant wedding I’m ever likely to attend. In addition I remembered my shoes and got to the ceremony on time which put me ahead of the other wedding I went to in 2012, so it was a success all round. I failed to see a baseball game though, despite getting tickets, so I have to go back at some point. I’m not that concerned about baseball, but an excuse is an excuse.
Washington DC was an interesting jaunt through places I’ve seen in movies along with some really impressive museums. The one with a section focussed on the Evil British burning down the White House 1999 years earlier gave me a new interest in the 1812 war which was as incompetently led and fought as any of the modern conflicts our countries have been involved in. I went to a Maryland Renascence Fair, opening my eyes to the US impression of Europe in the middle ages which led to a fair amount of amusement, particularly one teenager’s reaction to meeting a ‘real-life English person.’ Apparently they don’t get many of those in the forests of Maryland. The huge theme park we went to was mostly empty and thus brilliant, especially the rides that made other people first pass out and then flicker their eyelids over their upturned eyes making them look possessed. G-forces are fun until Satan takes one of you.
St Louis was possibly the friendliest city I’ve ever been to. I’d like to think that it wasn’t just my accent that got me drinks for four days but it’s a definite possibility. That said, I had people offering me help before I even spoke so I must be at least half-right. From the girl serving at the bar who looked very much like Natalie Portman and the couple on their honeymoon to the slightly deranged veteran on the train to the guy in the truck who saw me jay walking in an evening suit and offered me a lift to the wedding I was obviously late for, everyone seemed happy to sit and chat for a while. I’d like to point out I wasn’t late. I’m British, we just cross the road wherever we please if we can do it without being run down.
Like I said, the wedding was a glorious affair and the band in particular showed a lot of talent, ranging from The Way you Look Tonight to Come On Eileen and everything in between, which was certainly different from the mobile disco I expect at a wedding reception. I ended up skanking hard enough to break my own shoes, which might have been linked to the free bar. ‘Could I have a Whisky please?’
‘Sure, what do you want with it?’
‘Just a couple of cubes of Ice thanks.’
I see you’re a man who appreciates the good whisky,’ said the barman, pulling a dusty 21 year matured Islay single malt from under the bar.
‘Yes, Yes I am.’
He was a good barman. The kind that sees four shots as the minimum that you should put in any one glass: I said it was a friendly town. I wouldn’t want to do tequila with him though.
All in all it was a good year. I climbed a mountain, cycled from London to the South coast, ran a marathon, went to America. It was all good. Halfway through October I decided it was time to leave my job. The reasons are long and boring, but come down to the job leaving me overstressed and ethically compromised. A good proportion of teachers leave the profession within three years, so I guess I beat the trend by doing three and a half: it’s not like a teacher dropping out at this stage is a unique event. The job is hard enough with my career being in the hands of 16 year-olds doing exams and the government running the education sector into the ground without bullying management focussed on statistics and continual prioritisation of the statistics over the students. But that’s what has happened to the majority of the state-run sector. That said, I got a lot of surprised looks when I was asked what school I was going to and I said I wasn’t going anywhere. There’s a recession, jobs are hard to find, but still teachers like me are dropping out.
I had a lot of good experiences at the school. I made good friends and met interesting people. I went on loads of trips, including to Paris and Sicily which saved me a whole lot of money travelling. I also taught some brilliant lessons on the basis that if I found it fun the kids would probably be onboard too. My shadow puppet lessons worked well and The Charge of The Light Brigade reenacted on the school field with ‘Russians’ throwing paper shuriken at the ‘British’ running between them was particularly memorable and pretty useful in showing what happened at the Battle of Balaclava. The next day an email went around telling us to stay in our classrooms for health and safety reasons. No more sitting under the trees in the Summer reading poetry, back to the leaky classroom and failing lights. Also, more exam practice papers, I love teaching those.
In a way I suppose I’m lucky that I started teaching outside of state-schools so I know there are alternatives. Nova actually worked out well for me in this respect as I got a part-time job teaching ESOL almost immediately. It doesn’t pay much, but as long as the car is running and my rent is paid I can keep petrol in my tank while looking for something better. It’s also given me time to get some writing done. Also a lot of procrastination, but I’m nineteen thousand words into a book which is a decent start. Unless I re-read it later and it’s 19000 words of dross. Still, I figure that if I don’t do it now, when will I do it?
My contract with the school didn’t finish until March 2013 which was a long drawn-out goodbye, but I was immediately happier knowing that I was leaving. Which is good, because for 3 months I was doing both the evening ESOL classes and teaching at the school at the same time: recreation was something that happened to other people. That said, I did manage a sneaky, cheap holiday to Corfu to sit in the sun for a week, so I can’t really complain.
When I left, my department clubbed together and got be a bunch of gift vouchers which I used to buy myself a remote control helicopter. Helicopters are cool. At least they are when they’re not crashing into a tree or my garden pond. I still haven’t got the hang of flying the thing anywhere with a breeze, so it spends most of it’s time diving into the ground and digging up chunks of dirt with the main rotor. That could probably be a metaphor for my teaching career if I thought about it.
By Easter, getting out was a definite relief. Schools are increasingly seeing themselves as businesses that need to create a product and keep a reputation and mine was no different. The combination of education bullshit (ask me about Keegan) and corporate bullshit (ask me about enforced and unpaid overtime) had combined to form a mountain of excrement in the department that made everyone miserable. Perhaps it was my joy at leaving The Pit which led to me crippling myself for the better part of this year. On the dance floor of a mostly reputable brewery-pub I was bobbing along in a fairly non-committed way, despite the fairly attractive girl dancing opposite me. I’ve learned about fairly attractive girls: don’t trust them if they ask you to trust them. Especially with inner tubes. Turning to pick up my pint, which was more interesting than the music, led to my knee twisting a little too far and I collapsed onto the floor to the general bemusement of all. The next 30 minutes were spent probing my swelling joint to try to work out if my kneecap was still attached, or at least in the right vicinity. I honestly couldn’t be sure at that point.
After struggling back to Richie’s and sleeping on a floor I found myself unable to walk for a week and on crutches or a walking stick for the next three months. On the bright side I didn’t spend too much, which was good considering my lack of work over the Summer.
The second half of 2013 was quiet: I visited friends, did some writing, saw my mum graduate and so on. There was another wedding, this time James, my oldest friend from secondary school. I got to be a best man, delivered a decent speech and shouted at family members to get to the right places for photos. Besides losing an usher at one point and dancing like a fool despite my buggered knee, (it turns out I can still air guitar,) everything went well. I blame Summer of 69.
Which pretty much brings us up to now, January 2014. I finally get to see a physiotherapist on Thursday, a mere 8 months after the injury occurred, which is probably quite good going for the NHS these days. I can walk fairly normally now though so hopefully I can run, ride or swim at some point this year and make an attempt at being fairly fit again. In between procrastination. I’m just glad I finally typed this thing up, now I can get back to the book. And plan some lessons I guess. Things to do and so on.
